John Hudson

Schr

Writing in today’s Guardian, Yvette Cooper - the Social Exclusion Minister - argues that tackling social exclusion will not, alone, promote social justice and that the Blair government needs to go a step further by addressing inequality too.

This is very interesting - particularly given the lengths Blair went to to avoid recourse to the language of equality rather than inclusion when interviewed by Paxman during the 2001 General Election campaign. The Guardian interpret it as a signal that the government’s anti-poverty drive is being stepped up and report that Brown & Prescott are holding special meetings with all departments ahead of the 2004 Spending Review to ensure that their programmes will address issues surrounding poverty, social mobility & generational inequality.

…to divide the Cabinet according to the Sunday Times. Papers leaked to them suggest a divide between Blunkett & Straw in particular over both the pace of change and the extent to which it is likely to produce a positive set of outcomes.

SAFC are in the Semi Final of the FA Cup

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According to today’s Guardian, so the e-Envoy will remain in post for slightly longer than planned. A hint too that the delay is tied up with the Spending Review.

Michael Cross has a piece on directgov in today’s Guardian Online. He points to a couple of important weaknesses:

Directgov falls a long way short of the “online government store” previously trailed by the e-envoy. Citizens will still need to go to individual agencies’ sites for “transactions”, such as filing tax returns online. Directgov’s relationship with local government, which is responsible for most regular contacts with officialdom, is also unclear.

Interestingly, he points the finger at Douglas Alexander for the slow pace of change:

Pinder blames the complexities of joining up systems at the “back end” of government. However political caution may also be to blame. Pinder’s immediate political boss, the Cabinet Office minister Douglas Alexander, is understood to be highly averse to taking risks with IT.

The first site to emerge from the mysociety project - Downing Street Says - has gone live. The site automatically captures press briefings from the PMOS and allows readers the opportunity to respond. Still thought our submission to the mysociety project - inequalities.net - was a winner… can’t believe they didn’t go for it!

David Cameron has a piece in the Guardian predicting Blair will resign this year due to a combination of mounting pressures and the fact that the summer will mark his tenth anniversary as Labour leader. If it proves to be true and Schröder’s troubles deepen too our paper comparing the UK, German and Korean third ways will be in danger of being a piece of historical commentary by the time its finished!

A survey conducted by Amicus has found that a phenomenal 40% of UK workers have no pension provision outside of that provided by the state.

Jeremy Rifkin of the Foundation of Economic Trends has a piece in today’s Guardian - Return of a Conundrum - which suggests that technological change is producing a crisis in world employment levels.

He says some 1 billion people are unemployed are underemployed and that the culprit is not globalisation and the relocation of jobs to low wage regions but, rather, technological advancement and the automation of tasks. He argues:

Manufacturing employment has declined every year in the past seven years and in every region of the world. The employment decline occurred during a period when global industrial production rose by more than 30%.

If the current rate of decline continues - and it is more than likely to accelerate - manufacturing employment will dwindle from the current 164m jobs to just a few million by 2040, virtually ending the era of mass factory labour.

Further, he suggests that this trend is no longer confined to the manufacturing sector:

Now the white-collar and services industries are experiencing similar job losses, as intelligent technologies replace more and more workers. Banking, insurance, and the wholesale and retail sectors are introducing smart technologies into every aspect of their business operations, fast eliminating support personnel in the process. The US internet banking company Netbank has $2.4bn in deposits. A typical bank that size employs 2,000 people. Netbank runs its entire operation with just 180 workers.

The UK and US jobs being lost to call centres in India, while important, pale in significance compared with jobs lost every day to voice recognition technology. Consider the US phone company Sprint, which has been steadily replacing human operators with this technology. In the year 2002, Sprint’s productivity jumped 15% and revenue increased by 4.3%, while the company reduced its payroll by 11,500.

And so:

Herein lies the conundrum. If dramatic advances in productivity can replace more and more human labour, resulting in more workers being let go from the workforce, where will the consumer demand come from to buy all the potential new products and services? We are being forced to face up to an inherent contradiction at the heart of our market economy that has been present since the very beginning, but is only now becoming irreconcilable.

His argument echoes some points made in a 10 Downing Street Millennium Lecture titled Wealth Creation in the Knowledge Economy given by David Potter (Psion Chairman) in 1999 that, by chance, I surfed upon again yesterday while looking for something else. He pointed out that while, over the course of the past three decades, the proportion of the UK workforce employed in manufacturing had declined from around 50% to around 15%, the output of the manufacturing sector had increased by around a third in real terms. Potter suggested:

The core lesson here is… that making things is becoming increasingly automated and routine… There is a parallel with the agrarian revolution where most of the labour force worked on the land to grow the things we required to eat. Today some 3% of the labour force works on the land and produces a cornucopia greater than our needs. In fifty years time, it might well be that only 5% of the work force make things, but produce all that we reasonably require.

Potter, like Rifkin, feels

we are in the relatively early phases of a major economic revolution. This revolution is based around the concept of a post industrial era where making things is increasingly automated and routine, creating things is difficult and value therefore derives from creation and from the intellectual capital or knowledge base of the firm or nation.